How the Deal Went Down

Saving democracy in the Depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his first campaign for President, in 1932.Credit Photograph by Hulton Archive / Getty

In September, 1939, just as the Second World War was beginning, a left-wing Italian shoe salesman named Bruno Rizzi published a book, in Paris, called “The Bureaucratization of the World.” Rizzi brought the book out at his own expense; he couldn’t find a publisher. In early 1940, he was charged by French authorities with racial defamation—there was an anti-Semitic chapter in his book—and he was fined and received a suspended sentence. Remaining copies of the book were confiscated and pulped.

Rizzi hadn’t used his full name on the cover—he identified himself as Bruno R.—and he more or less disappeared from view in the chaos of the war. (He resurfaced afterward.) “The Bureaucratization of the World” might have slipped into oblivion but for one thing: Rizzi had managed to get a copy to Leon Trotsky, who was living in exile in the village of Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. Trotsky read the book and was sufficiently exercised to write an article criticizing it. The article was published, in November, 1939, in a journal called The New International, an organ of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization based in New York City.

Rizzi had argued that under Stalin’s leadership the Soviet Union had a political system that was neither capitalist nor socialist. It was something that Marx had not foreseen: a system that Rizzi called “bureaucratic collectivism.” The Soviet Union was being ruled by a new class of Party functionaries and industrial technicians, who exploited the workers the same way the capitalists had. It had become just like the fascist states of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

What was more, Rizzi said, the United States was headed in the same direction. With Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a ruling class of government administrators and corporate managers was taking over. Bureaucracy was emerging as the form of government everywhere. “A monstrous new world . . . is being born,” Rizzi wrote, “and born so evil that it is resurrecting slavery after two thousand years of history.” He predicted that the planet would eventually be dominated by seven or eight of these bureaucratic autocracies.

To Trotsky, this was heretical. Even after Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and the Red Army invaded Poland, Trotsky’s position was that the Soviet Union was a genuine workers’ state. It had a planned economy and state ownership of property. In his New International article, Trotsky held Rizzi up as a comrade who had got things wrong. What Rizzi failed to understand, Trotsky explained, was that, although Stalin himself was a counter-revolutionary aberration, the Stalinist phenomenon had to be understood dialectically (Marxian for “the opposite of what it appears to be”). Stalinism was only an evil hiccup in the course of history—the course, correctly predicted by Marx and Engels, that led to the classless society.

Like all Marxist theoretical disputes, this was really a dispute over a practical question: Should people on the left continue to support the Soviet Union now that Stalin was an ally of Hitler? Trotsky insisted that they should. (For his pains, he was murdered by a Stalinist agent, in August, 1940.) But many of his American followers disagreed. The dispute split the Socialist Workers Party. One of the editors of The New International, Max Shachtman, resigned (or was expelled; accounts differ) from the Party. The other, James Burnham, also defected and soon rejected Marxism altogether, quickly becoming one of the most hawkish anti-Communist intellectuals in America. After the war was over, he recommended a preëmptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

In 1941, Burnham published a book called “The Managerial Revolution.” He hadn’t read “The Bureaucratization of the World,” which, in 1941, was about as out of print as a book can be. But he had read Trotsky’s summary of it—he was Trotsky’s editor, after all—and his argument was basically Bruno R.’s argument. The economies of the major powers, Burnham said, had fallen into the hands of a new élite: the managers, executives, financiers, and stockholders who owned and ran corporations, and the government administrators who regulated them.

Burnham had earlier described the New Deal as “preparing the United States for the comparatively smooth transition to Fascism,” and he folded the United States easily into his picture of a world headed toward top-down managerialism. He thought that the nations farthest along the road were Russia, Germany, and Italy, which suggested that totalitarian dictatorship was managerialism’s natural political form. Rizzi had imagined a world dominated by seven or eight autocratic states; Burnham foresaw three, centered in the areas where advanced industry was already concentrated—the United States, Japan, and Germany. Wars of the future, he said, would be struggles among these superstates for world control.

Burnham, too, had trouble finding a publisher, but, when the book finally appeared, it was a huge success. Time listed “The Managerial Revolution” as one of the top six books of 1941; a critic at the Times named it one of the year’s notable books. A hundred thousand copies were sold in the United States and Britain, and it did even better in paperback. One of its keenest readers was George Orwell, and “The Managerial Revolution” was a major influence on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” with its three totalitarian monster states.

Why the world didn’t turn out quite the way that Rizzi and Burnham predicted, and that Orwell satirically imagined, is the subject of Ira Katznelson’s ambitious, fascinating, and slightly dark “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time” (Liveright). The semi-darkness has to do with what Katznelson thinks happened to the New Deal revolution after the death of Roosevelt, his account of how a belief in the common good gave way to a central government dominated by interest-group politics and obsessed with national security. The fascination has to do with his focus on the underside of New Deal lawmaking, the compromises that were necessary to get reform legislation passed by Congress. And the ambition has to do with the mundane fact that there are already many histories of the New Deal in circulation.

Some of those works, as Katznelson says, are canonical: the three volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,’s unfinished “The Age of Roosevelt” (1957-60), William E. Leuchtenburg’s “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal” (1963), and David M. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Freedom from Fear” (1999). But Katznelson thinks that much of the scholarship on the New Deal is “too insular and too limited.” For one thing, he says, it tends to cast Roosevelt as the protagonist.

The tendency is understandable. Roosevelt is one of the most enigmatic figures in American politics. When he first took the oath of office, on March 4, 1933, he was considered by many people, including more than a few of his supporters, to be a lightweight. “A pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be president,” the liberal columnist Walter Lippmann described him.

Roosevelt was neither self-reflective nor a deep thinker. “His knowledge of political and constitutional history and theory was distinctly limited,” his onetime aide and speechwriter Raymond Moley wrote. “During all the time I was associated with him I never knew him to read a serious book.” There was steel within, of course, but Roosevelt’s usual manner was casual and blithe. To some observers, he seemed exactly the sort of person who could say (as, indeed, he is supposed to have said, although well before he became President) that not getting tapped for Porcellian when he was an undergraduate at Harvard was the bitterest disappointment of his life.

He was also a disastrous administrator. His style of governance was personal and ad hoc—something that was as true of his dealings with Stalin as it was of his dealings with his Cabinet or with Congress. He was a man of many faces, none of which could be identified with confidence as “the real Roosevelt.” “The rich man’s friend, the poor man’s brother, the stern puritan conscience, the easygoing, indulgent, and forgiving friend of the irregulars,” Frances Perkins, his Secretary of Labor, said of him. He seems to have meant exactly what he said when he was asked once what his philosophy was: “Philosophy? Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat—that’s all.”

Even Roosevelt’s electoral success, and he was the most successful politician in American history, can’t be entirely explained by the usual theories. The First New Deal—that is, the legislation passed by the Seventy-third Congress, between 1933 and 1935—did not end the Depression. The main elements of its great statutory pillars, the National Industrial Recovery Act (N.I.R.A.) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (A.A.A.), were struck down by the Supreme Court. When Roosevelt ran for reëlection in 1936, the unemployment rate was 16.9 per cent, almost twice what it had been in 1930. Yet he won five hundred and twenty-three electoral votes, and his opponent, Alf Landon, won eight. When Roosevelt ran for the unprecedented third term, unemployment was 14.6 per cent. He carried thirty-eight states; Wendell Willkie carried ten.

As almost everyone who has written about him has concluded, voters trusted Roosevelt to lead the country through eight years of economic desolation, followed by a two-front war, because of his personality. He warned in his first Inaugural Address against the fear of fear, and he seemed fearless himself. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s judgment, after Roosevelt had paid a short visit at the time of the inauguration, is often quoted: “A second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Holmes was probably referring to Theodore Roosevelt, whom he knew well, and was misheard. But the phrase got repeated as a précis of Franklin Roosevelt’s character. Roosevelt was buoyant, good-humored, and, above all, a great optimist. In the crisis, optimism was what people needed.

But it was a different talent that enabled Roosevelt to accomplish what he did as Chief Executive—to remain in office for more than twelve years and to preside over the repurposing of government, the salvation of capitalism, and the destruction of fascism. He loved politics. “His mental processes,” as Moley put it, “were essentially political.” This understates the case a little. Roosevelt wasn’t merely a political pragmatist, someone who is less interested in the ideological provenance of a policy than in its effectiveness—although he was. He was creative. He saw that government was being underutilized, and he tried out ideas that no President had thought to try out before and found ways to put them into practice. He was an experimentalist.

The Constitution “is an experiment, as all life is an experiment,” Holmes wrote in a famous dissent. That is what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address: democracy is an experiment the goal of which is to keep the experiment going. The purpose of democracy is to enable people to live democratically. That’s it. Democracy is not a means to something else; there is no higher good that we’re trying as a society to attain. When we compromise with democracy in order to achieve some other purpose, even when the purpose is to defend democracy, then we are in danger of losing it.

Katznelson thinks that this is exactly the significance of the New Deal. In a period of depression and totalitarianism, the New Deal proved that liberal democracy still worked. Writers like Rizzi and Burnham believed, and writers like Orwell feared, that, in a world of high-tech economies and mass publics, elected officials who had no technical expertise and little control over the means of production, distribution, and communication were incapable of governing a modern state. Market economies and representative governments looked like artifacts of the nineteenth century. In Germany, the Weimar Republic had failed. In France, the Third Republic was dying. Italy, Spain, and Japan were fascistic. Didn’t the Crash and the Great Depression, and the frighteningly successful job that Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were doing to advance the industrial and military strength of their countries, prove that capitalism and democracy were inefficient, uncoördinated, and obsolete, and that something different—bureaucratic collectivism, the managerial state, or simply enlightened dictatorship—was not only inevitable but possibly morally necessary?

The promise of Roosevelt was the promise that, despite what looked like the tide of history, democracy would survive. This was not a promise only to Americans. It was read as a promise to the world. “His impulse,” Winston Churchill wrote during Roosevelt’s first year in office, “is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land, and which, as it glows the brighter, may well eclipse both the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia.”

The problem with casting Roosevelt as the lead in this drama, Katznelson points out, is that it allows people to say that the United States, in its hour of national emergency, essentially installed a dictator (which is, in fact, what many of Roosevelt’s opponents believed he was). If the recovery from the Depression and the successful prosecution of the war against the Axis were all the doing of the President and the executive branch, then democracy did not do the prevailing. Democracy prevailed only if the system functioned in the way it was designed to function: Congress passes laws, the executive signs or refuses to sign them, and the judiciary reviews the results. It wasn’t chief executives whom people thought had become obsolete in the nineteen-thirties. It was legislatures. “Fear Itself” is a history of the New Deal from the point of view of Congress.

Roosevelt did not override the system, but it was a close call. On the day he took the oath of office, the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade suspended trading. Not a single bank was open in twenty-eight states, and a number of other states had strict restrictions on withdrawals. Thirteen million people were out of work. It was indeed an hour of national emergency, and in his Inaugural Address Roosevelt warned that if Congress failed to act he would request “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

He called for a special session of Congress. It convened on March 9th and began passing legislation that day. Over a period of a hundred days, Roosevelt sent fifteen bills up to the Capitol, and fifteen laws were returned to the White House for his signature. The foundation of the New Deal was built. Congress had not ceded power to the executive. And, to the surprise of many people, Roosevelt had established himself as a leader.

As Kennedy emphasizes in “Freedom from Fear,” there was no master plan, no guiding philosophy, for the reforms that Roosevelt oversaw. Some were his idea; some were Congress’s; some were left over from the Hoover Administration. Roosevelt was improvising. He certainly did not have a grasp of the concept of deficit spending. He was generally fiscally conservative, and in the beginning his policies were actually deflationary. One of his first acts was to cut the budget.

In any case, there was no theory of deficit spending for him to rely on. John Maynard Keynes did not publish his “General Theory,” explaining how government spending increases effective demand, until 1936. Keynes argued that the government could stimulate the economy by burying bottles of money in abandoned coal mines and letting private entrepreneurship contrive ways to dig them up. But when Roosevelt proposed public jobs programs he didn’t think he was priming the pump. He thought he was putting unemployed people to work.

In its two-year life, the Seventy-third Congress raised tax rates, ended the tax-exempt status of corporate dividends, limited deductions for capital depreciation, and approved the exercise of eminent domain. It restored the banking system, increased federal unemployment assistance to the states, and authorized the President to negotiate tariff reductions in order to promote free trade. It passed the A.A.A., which was aimed at increasing the purchasing power of farmers, and the N.I.R.A., which mandated a minimum wage and maximum hours in certain businesses, asserted the right of workers to organize, and gave the federal government power to oversee production and prices in some industries.

It also passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial from investment banking. (The repeal of this provision, in 1999, is what led, in the opinion of some, to the financial meltdown of 2008.) And it created the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Seventy-fourth Congress (1935-37), the Congress of the Second Hundred Days, passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), which protected unions; created the Social Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration; and passed laws regulating railroads and public utilities and prohibiting unfair price discrimination.

If all of this could be described as a collaboration between the President and Congress, could it also be described as one-party rule? In 1930, the Senate had thirty-nine Democrats (plus one third-party member) and fifty-six Republicans, and the House of Representatives had a hundred and sixty-four Democrats and two hundred and seventy Republicans. When Roosevelt came into office, in 1933, there were fifty-nine Democratic senators. In the next Congress, there were sixty-nine. In 1937, there were eighty Democrats and progressives in the Senate and three hundred and forty-seven in the House of Representatives; only sixteen senators and eighty-eight congressmen were Republicans. Apart from the Eightieth Congress (1947-49) and Eisenhower’s first Congress (1953-55), Republicans did not have a majority in either chamber again until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

But there was a worm in this fruit. During the entire period that Roosevelt was President (and well beyond it), seventeen states mandated racial segregation, and almost every senator and congressman from those states was a Democrat. Katznelson argues that the members of this Southern bloc were “the most important ‘veto players’ in American politics.” They maintained what he calls a “Southern cage” around New Deal legislation.

Southern Democrats were almost unanimously supportive of progressive economic policies, but they were, in one respect, solidly reactionary. They were vigilant to resist any threat to what they sometimes euphemistically referred to as the Southern way of life but more often called, quite proudly, white supremacy. “The colored race will not vote, because in so doing . . . they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent, perhaps of the world,” Senator Claude Pepper, of Florida, said in 1937. And Pepper was a liberal. In 1950, he lost his seat to the conservative Democrat George Smathers, who campaigned against him by calling him Red Pepper.

It’s true that Roosevelt would have won all four Presidential elections without a single Southern electoral vote, and it’s also true that most of the major New Deal legislation enacted between 1933 and 1937 passed Congress by overwhelming majorities. But, thanks in part to the seniority system, the South had a disproportionate say in what came before Congress and what did not. And, as the New Deal proceeded, Southerners were an increasingly unstable piece of the Roosevelt coalition. Making liberal democracy work in the years of the Depression and the war meant compromising with elected officials who were illiberal and undemocratic. Roosevelt understood the politics, and stayed away from the issue of segregation.

All politics is local, Tip O’Neill said. To the extent that this is so, it means that, in a representative government, “the national interest” or “the common good” is realized as the object of legislation only when local interests happen to converge. Southern Democrats were not making a deal with the Roosevelt White House, supporting economic reform in exchange for noninterference in Southern race relations. They voted their local interests. It happened that, for a while, these coincided with the national interest.

The South was the most impoverished region of the country, and the Depression made conditions there worse. Katznelson says that the average annual income for all Americans in 1937 was $604; in the South, it was $314. The gross annual income of the average Southern farmer was $186. Almost a tenth of the population was illiterate. Southern Democrats were therefore happy to have railroads, public utilities, the financial industry—and, as Katznelson puts it, “other Northern-controlled capitalist firms”—regulated. As representatives of a region whose economy was mainly agricultural, they were also happy to support measures to help farmers. And since their principal goods, cotton and tobacco, were manufactured for export, they were eager to promote free trade. They were additionally pleased, in light of their economic circumstances but also in light of their history, to vote for programs that effectively redistributed wealth from the industrial North to the rural South.

In short, Southerners were progressives and redistributionists less by ideological conviction than by self-interest. “I admit I am a New Dealer,” James Byrnes, of South Carolina, said when he ran for reëlection to the Senate in 1936, “and if [the New Deal] takes money away from the few who have controlled the country and gives it to the average man, I am going back to Washington to help the President work for the people of South Carolina and of the country.”

“Having kids was the biggest mistake I ever made five thousand times.”Buy the print »

Southern Democrats affected New Deal legislation in several ways. They carved out exceptions in bills regulating business—such as bills setting a minimum wage—for farming and domestic service, since that was work performed in the South predominately by African-Americans. They retarded the growth of the labor movement and tried to block efforts to unionize in the South, suspecting, rightly, that unions were motors of racial integration. They defeated anti-lynching legislation by arguing, first, that lynching was technically illegal already and, second, that, since people are regularly murdered elsewhere in the United States, a federal anti-lynching law would be discriminatory.

Most significant, though, they insured that the administration of New Deal policies was decentralized. They pried open the tax-levy coffers in Washington, but exercised strict control over how and to whom that money trickled down in their states. They tried to expand the regional economy without undermining apartheid. As the South has always done, they asserted the claim of states’ rights at just the point when the shoe started to pinch, and not a moment before.

Southern Democrats were enthusiastic supporters of American entry into the war. The Southern economy had suffered from the European war’s effect on international trade, and Southern congressmen generally did not have to deal with a problem that Northern Democrats faced: constituents of German and Italian descent. The South was also solidly anti-fascist. Southerners rebuffed German efforts to reach out to them as fellow-racists, and they resisted, with a startling degree of righteousness, any analogy between Nazi anti-Semitism and Southern segregation.

It helped, too, that enormous federal investment was directed to the large number of military camps and war-production facilities in the South—camps and facilities that had been placed there at the time of the First World War by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner to be elected President since the Civil War.

But, in spite of all the vigilance, the camel did get its nose under the South’s tent. The ultimate irony of Southern support for the New Deal and the war effort, as Katznelson shows in careful detail, is that it produced a powerful and interventionist central government that one day (following considerable non-state agitation and inspiration within the South) brought the Southern way of life to an end. In 1933, there were five hundred and seventy-two thousand federal employees, and government spending was $4.6 billion. In 1945, the government had 3.8 million employees (almost fifty per cent more than it does today), and spending was $92 billion. It owned forty per cent of the nation’s capital assets. Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress had created a leviathan.

Relations between the Administration and Southern Democrats were already frayed. “By 1938, the willful amnesia and quiet accommodation of racism on the part of New Deal leaders were becoming untenable,” Katznelson says. Southern Democrats were beginning to appreciate the danger that reform bills posed to regional autonomy.

When it came to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a minimum wage and a forty-four-hour workweek and prohibited some forms of child labor, Southern Democrats, even after they had succeeded in carving out the usual exemptions, abandoned the White House and voted against it. That act is generally regarded as the last piece of New Deal legislation. Southerners saw it as a gift to labor unions, which had become an important political base for Democrats from industrial regions. James Byrnes complained that the Party had fallen under the sway of “Negroes of the North.”

The final split, Katznelson thinks, came when the Administration tried to pass a bill that would make it easier for soldiers stationed away from their home states to vote in national elections. By 1942, there were two hundred thousand African-Americans in the armed forces. But restriction of the franchise was the master key to white supremacy. Only about two thousand African-Americans were registered to vote in Alabama, and the same was true in Mississippi and in Louisiana. About twenty thousand, most of them in Atlanta, could vote in Georgia. The South managed to undermine soldier-voter legislation. Southerners pointed out that enabling every soldier to vote would violate the very principles that Southern soldiers were at war to defend. As Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, explained, “Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy.”

The division over soldier voting, Katznelson thinks, was the beginning of the Southern Democratic-Republican alliance, an alliance that fractured the Democratic Party. Byrnes’s complaint about Northern Negroes did not prevent Roosevelt from appointing him to the Supreme Court, in 1941, nor did it prevent Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, from making him his Secretary of State. But in 1952 Byrnes endorsed Eisenhower for President.

Katznelson argues that two things after 1945 changed New Deal beliefs about government. The first was the decision to embrace fiscal policy—Keynesianism—as the main instrument of state regulation of the economy. The government started burying bottles of money instead of actively working with business and labor to increase productivity. It assumed the role of neutral arbiter in the struggles among interest groups for regulatory preferment and a piece of the pie. The second was the rapid rise of the national-security state—the enormous increases in defense spending, the development of a nuclear arsenal, and the authorization of covert military and political operations abroad. Power over most national-security matters was placed in the hands of the executive. The legislature, apart from occasionally using its power of appropriation to influence foreign policy, in effect voted itself observer status.

Southern Democrats stoutly supported the Truman Administration’s military buildup, much of which was concentrated in the South. By the time Eisenhower took office, in 1953, $52.8 billion of the nation’s $76.1 billion budget was being spent on defense. Southerners also supported the granting of broad, nonspecific authority to the new Central Intelligence Agency, congressional investigations of subversives, and the creation of the Federal Employee Loyalty Program.

That program, established by executive order in 1947, assigned the F.B.I. and other agencies to undertake investigations of employees suspected of disloyalty. Over the next nine years, more than five million federal employees were screened. Twelve thousand resigned, and an estimated twenty-seven hundred were fired. (No espionage was ever discovered.) Beyond these cases—this is the subject of Landon R. Y. Storrs’s convincing account in “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left” (Princeton)—the loyalty program had a chilling effect on government workers who regarded themselves as in the tradition of New Deal progressivism. Reform, planning, and organizing started to look un-American.

We tend to understand the rise of the national-security state as an overreaction to Cold War tensions, but the pieces were put into place during Roosevelt’s Presidency. The two War Powers Acts (December, 1941, and March, 1942) gave Roosevelt, as Katznelson puts it, “more power over American capitalism than he had achieved even during the New Deal’s radical moment.” Truman inherited a big government with enormous power already vested in the executive. When he was persuaded by advisers like Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze that the Soviet threat was real and that it demanded heightened military preparedness—ultimately, an arms race—the system was ready to accommodate him. He didn’t have to reinvent government.

Katznelson is right that the missionlike focus on defense and national security at the expense of domestic programs was a cost to democracy. It was a cost not because threats were unreal but because it overrode the system. It compelled the public to accept a high degree of secrecy, and led to the frequent invocation of “national security” as a justification for executive prerogative. It took the legislature largely out of play. And it revived the spectre of the authoritarian state that writers like Burnham and Orwell had frightened many people about.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published in 1949. By 1956, it had sold more than two million copies. In those years, the peak period of Cold War tensions, the novel was read as a warning about Communism. The book continued to sell at a fantastic rate after 1956, but by then was often read as a warning about creeping totalitarianism within the liberal democracies, particularly the United States.

Worries about the emergence of a new ruling class composed of bureaucrats and technocrats appears again and again in the Cold War period. C. Wright Mills, in 1956, described a “power élite.” In 1961, Eisenhower famously warned about the “military-industrial complex”: an establishment, he said, whose “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” John Kenneth Galbraith, in 1967, described the dominance of a ruling “technostructure,” which he thought was becoming a mode of management in all industrial states. (Galbraith later acknowledged the influence of Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution.”)

There were conspiratorial versions of the claim, too—theories about the secret power of the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group. And rule by cabal or by a shadow state was the subject of dozens of thrillers and Hollywood movies. Decreasing faith that elected government knew what it was doing was complemented by increasing suspicion that some other, mostly invisible body must. The New Deal may have saved the system, but Katznelson is far from the only person who worries that some of its undemocratic precedents are now baked in.

The breakup of the Democratic Party was a slow-motion train wreck. In 1948, Southerners walked out of the Democratic National Convention in opposition to a civil-rights plank in the Party platform. With Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, as their candidate, the dissident Dixiecrats carried four Southern states, nearly costing Truman the election. The Illinois liberal Adlai Stevenson twice put Southerners on the ticket—John Sparkman, of Alabama, an arch-segregationist, in 1952, and Estes Kefauver, a liberal from Tennessee who waffled on civil rights, in 1956. Stevenson carried much of the South—which had become known as the region of “yellow-dog Democrats,” whites who would vote for a yellow dog as long as it was a Democrat—but he carried little else.

The Democratic Party did reinvent itself as the party of civil rights and individual liberties. And, in the nineteen-sixties, there was another moment of constructive collaboration between a liberal President and a Democratic Congress, the collaboration described by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot in “The Liberal Hour” (2008). But in 1964, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, five Southern states voted for the Republican, Barry Goldwater, rather than for the Southerner Lyndon Johnson. With the election of Richard Nixon, in 1968, the realignment was virtually complete. The Democrats spent the next forty years looking for a coalition that could win a national election without the South. They seem to have found it. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.